Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The idea behind asset allocation is simple: when one market struggles, it’s OK because an investor can jump into another that is thriving. Not so in 2015. In fact, if you judge the past year by which U.S. investment class generated the largest return, a case can be made it was the worst for asset-allocating…
Tishman Speyer Properties, one of New York City’s most active real estate developers, had bought two parcels of land on the Far West Side of Manhattan to clear the way for a 2.8-million-square-foot office tower planned for Hudson Yards. Standing in the way, though, were the occupants of two apartments on the site. So this…
Luxury real estate firms in New York City make a lot of money helping wealthy foreigners exploit the state’s tax lawsnow some firms overseas want to share in the joy of being richly rewarded middlemen. The Times reports that real estate companies from Germany and London are expanding here to explicitly target New York’s “ever-expanding…
A mock-up of the view $100 million could buy you (Extell). We mentioned this in passing yesterday (because we immediately passed out from the numbers involved), but it’s worth diving into the nitty-gritty: a mystery buyer has shelled out over $100 million to buy a duplex in One57, one of the luxury skyscrapers on…
Midtown Manhattan will soon be teeming with luxury skyscrapers, thanks to all the development underway on 57th Street’s so-called Billionaires’ Row. But it appears that the rich people shopping for homes in these monsters might not know about all the other needle buildings that’ll be their neighbors, since developers have been conveniently erasing fellow skyscrapers…
David Rosen / Flickr, CCThis isn’t me, obviously. It just feels like me.I had an annoying surprise this weekend: an email from a bank telling me that Twitter had deleted two of my tweets for copyright violations. The email also contained a threat: If I continued to violate the bank’s rights, my Twitter account would be…
You probably know at least one person who always tends to bet on the loser. From laserdiscs to New Coke, they adore the unpopular product. Turns out that that’s a predictable trait, and the people who display it are “Harbingers of Failure.” What happens when a group of professors from MIT, Northwestern University, and the…
Star Wars arrived in theatres yesterday, creating a massive demand for internet content that reaffirms the movie as a cornerstone of global culture. When a ‘phenomenon’ occurs, content farms must provide the content that supplements the phenomenon and offers a meaningful buildup. This arc is present in entertainment, news, media, and mass niche internet…
Image: Screenshot, YouTube Warning: Spoilerz. The results are in for The Force Awakens, the receipts tallied, the reviews aggregated, and just look at all those zeros and blissful tomatoes. Critics and fans seem thrilled that JJ Abrams has concocted an exciting, fast-paced Star Wars installment that is genuinely fun to watch. That captures the…
There has been much research that shows that page performance — how fast a page loads — can have a significant effect on the bottom line of a company. However, most of the research is focused on eCommerce sites. I have long been interested in seeing how page performance affects users on a news site, and Vox.com…